Worth mentioning for just a couple of small pictures (22.2 x 24.8 cm), Canapé 1 (2013) and Gloria Mundi (2013), in which the artist gets down and dirty for a change. The little white borders are meh and he’s still into the gloomy, glazed down setting but the looser treatment put me in mind of Sabine Moritz a bit, minus the politics, and with a juicier, more fluent facture. They might be just little jokey asides for Stevens, but I for one, welcome the diversion. I have Stevens pegged mostly as one of yer Po-Mo virtuosos, painting blobs of paint in exquisite chiaroscuro with clever titles and that. Snore. Bracket with Glenn Brown, Richard Patterson, Matthew Weir, maybe even Nigel Cooke, Simon Willems, James Wright and Louis Smith, to stretch a point.

That stuff is so dry and academic they feel like lectures. This show is still led by the largish (132.5 x 183 cm) Forty Days and Forty Sleepless Nights (2011) and I suppose corporate collections will still put their hand up for that kind of thing but my response is “Guys, get a life”. Stevens’ work has patiently worked through various photo sources and abstract or formal issues since the 90s so I’m hoping these are little signs of things to come. The stuff is unlikely to ever create much of a stir, but it’s fun to encounter them on a drab round of galleries.